Congratulations to the makers of and the actors in Gravity for the seven Oscars they won tonight, including Best Director for Alfonso Cuarón. Quite remarkable for a space drama with a near-term, (fairly) hard science, realistic approach to captivate audiences in huge numbers and to achieve so much critical acclaim.
I wish the scenario was less catastrophic but, as NASA Astronaut Mike Massimino indicates, the movie still manages to depict the amazing beauty and wonder of spaceflight in earth orbit:
“Enos was a good chimp. He was smart but he didn’t take to people,” Ed Dittmer, who trained primates at the Aero Medical facility at Holloman Air Force Base, said in a 1987 oral history. “A lot of people had the wrong impression of Enos. They said he was a mean chimp and so forth, but he wasn’t really mean. He just didn’t take to cuddling.”
Enos’ two-orbit flight was a major accomplishment in the Cold War-era Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Chase points me to the RocketSTEM website, which is dedicated to Inspiring the next generation of explorers. Their non-profit was created to foster “science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, as well as promoting the benefits of space exploration”.
bring together for a week computer scientists, machine learning experts, and the scientists from astronomy and planetary science based citizen science projects with the goal of taking the first steps towards addressing the critical questions and issues that citizen science will need to solve in order to cope with the petabtye data deluge from the the next generation observatories and space missions like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).
Dr. Alan Stern on Uwingu with /mystery guest today, 12 pm PST; 3 pm EST, http://www.thespaceshow.com . Call us @ 1-866-687-7223
A magazine names a crater: Newsweek Names a Mars Crater – Newsweek. No, the IAU does not “control” the names of celestial bodies. They are one group proffering names for celestial bodies. If other people use and recognize a name for a celestial body or feature, then that is the name for that body or feature for those people regardless of what the IAU names it. The IAU cannot force anyone to use the name in their database.